Mean and Pinchy's photostream  

Transplanted to southern Illinois from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Since some have asked about my somewhat unusual user name...

I am myself neither particularly mean nor pinchy, but I do keep pet crabs. I have twelve land hermits (Coenobita sp.) and four red claws (Sesarma bidens), and my first red claw crab is named Mean and Pinchy because of a species description I once read that made me giggle. She stands out from the rest not only because she was a rescue from someone's goldfish tank and came here with just one pincer (a little time and TLC helped her grow another), but because in June of 2006, she escaped from her aquarium and got lost. Red claws are agile climbers and absolutely amazing escape artists, and they also like to hide. These are shore crabs and do not survive for long unless humidity is very high and they have ready access to water, so my husband and I immediately put out shallow dishes of water and her favourite foods under furniture around the house, hoping to catch her, or at least keep her alive until we could, but to no avail. :(

Eventually, I gave her up for dead, but six weeks afterwards, I went down to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer and got a terrible scare. Sitting on the floor in front of the dryer was what initially appeared to be the biggest cockroach I'd ever seen outside of an insectarium! It was not a roach, though, and indeed not an insect at all; it was one very dirty little crab. She probably got down into the basement through a duct, but how she survived down there for six weeks with no food and no water but for a dirty old floor drain, I don't know. It was only luck, but sometimes, I like to think that she tired of living rough and taking care of herself, and came back to me of her own accord. She is only a crab--a small crustacean not even 2" across the carapace--but she is my pet, and she is special to me. :) There is a picture of her here.

My photos are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic licence. Anyone is free to use them for any non-commercial purpose, or to make derivative works. I'm not fussy about attribution--my name or user name is just fine--and you don't have to ask, but if you find a use for one of my shots, I'd love for you to send me a Flickr Mail and let me know. Bonus points if the use is educational or in the interest of wildlife/habitat preservation! :)